Art is love. Philosophy is loneliness. Philosophy only begins when Art is dead. Art is courage, strength, power, exhiliration. Philosophy is fear, weakness, regret, spite.
To make love to your lover is a form of Art. To think about it is a form of philosophy.
Every philosopher is the failed artist wishing to bring down the temple he cannot enter.
Plato burn´d his - unmourn´d - dramatic manuscripts & then try´d to manufacture Platonopolis to justify his failure where he decreed that all great artists should be neuter´d to become eunuchs of high-pitch´d wisdom, like him & his new superior philosophical dialogues. Because the poet he wish´d to be still ate his heart & resented the failure of the man to become a poet.
Tell the man in love he is not happy & he will laugh at you. That is the artist & he will kiss his lover & ignore you.
Tell the man who is alone that he is not happy and he will believe you. That is the philosopher & he will write books & destroy.
Be ye artists or be ye philosophers?

It´s a really extreme position and I do not agree. Because both the artist and the philosopher need´s the dialog between people like them and the society to get inspired as well as quiet moment´s in their study´s to perform their work ! And why should a philosopher who is not filled with love (about this world) spent or waste much time to think about his environment ?

Last edited by copain on Sun Jun 13, 2004 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Epicurus wrote:Empty is that philosophical argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in medicine, unless it casts out the illness of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out suffering from the soul.

Actually, I find the above views a bit extreme. Isn't philosophy itself a form of art, this of speech and reasoning? For many thinking is not only a solution to understanding problems but a way of expressing oneself. And certainly philosophy demands a great amount of inner courage and strength. Remember the ancient greek definition of shaping opinions: thesis, antithesis and finally synthesis. This process can be exhilarating and it needs the power of one convincing another. Philosophy may be difficult but can we found within one's soul, the same as art.

The word 'art' gets defined in so many strange ways, that I think the word has become stripped of any meaning at all. I'm sure I have no idea what the word means.

Each time I hear someone telling me what "art" is, I'm feel a compulsion to challenge them to tell me, "What is not art, then? Please give some examples of things that are not art." The way art is defined sometimes, you can include pretty much anything. One workable definition of "art" might be "things the speaker approves of", and "not art" would be "things the speaker does not approve of."

Now I kind of see why the Spaniards have ser and estar; there should be far more different "to be" verbs.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is the sum of different features from different people divided by the sum of their frequency. Philosophy is challenging the foundations of the world to strengthen them. A debate differs from an argument only in magnitude.